Facebook Tries to Outdo Twitter at the Super Bowl With a Real-Time Hub

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Facebook Tries to Outdo Twitter at the Super Bowl With a Real-Time Hub

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The Super Bowl is days away, and Facebook has two new reasons for you to keep one eye on its site while the other follows America's mammoth television event.

On Wednesday, the social media giant announced that it is launching Trending Super Bowl, a real-time hub that brings together content from Sunday’s game between the Patriots and Seahawks. Facebookers will be able to follow the game’s progress with a live scoreboard on the hub, and see a running play-by-play from the game.

For those who care more about the ads between play, the site will also run some videos of the Super Bowl’s biggest commercials. And it will pull various the Super Bowl-related posts, photos and videos from the media, celebrities, and, yes, your friends.

"We have been the second-screen, real-time audience," Dan Reed, head of global sports partnerships at Facebook, told the Associated Press. "This Trending Super Bowl is part of a broader effort to better surface the great conversations happening in real time around live sporting events."

More people now prefer to be on some kind of social media while watching a live television event, and that’s not a new thing. According to the 2014 Nielsen Digital Consumer Report, 84 percent of US smartphone and tablet owners today watch television with a second screen in hand. Facebook claims 85 percent of those people are on its site. It's no surprise the social media giant wants an even bigger slice of that pie.

And though Facebook hasn’t said so outright, it surely wants to steal at least some of an audience away from another well-watched social media platform during live TV events: Twitter. Twitter has long been the natural companion of TV viewers during broadcasts, in part because of its identity as a real-time social network. Facebook's Super Bowl hub is its chance to prove that it can do live events just as well as Twitter—or even better. To get a jump on the action, Facebook’s Trending Super Bowl will be live as early as Saturday morning.

That’s not the only arena where Facebook is seeking to challenge Twitter. Today, Reuters reports that Facebook is, for the first time, executing an ad strategy that will let the social network sell ads that target people based on what they are talking about in real-time—a tactic Twitter has already deployed in the past. When the lights went out during the Super Bowl in 2013, Mondelez International’s Oreo cleverly took advantage of the situation and sent out a bunch of tweets, a stunt that was considered to be a marketing coup.

At this year’s Super Bowl, Facebook will be able to automatically trigger videos to play on users’ newsfeeds, set off by certain keywords that users mention in their posts as they watch the game live.

Of course, the Super Bowl is not the first time Facebook and Twitter have battled it out for people’s attention. During the World Cup last year, both social networks announced impressive engagement statistics around the event. Facebook said it saw 3 billion interactions, including likes, comments and posts, from 350 million users throughout the event. By comparison, Twitter announced that its users shared 672 million tweets related to the World Cup throughout the tournament. And while those numbers may make it seem that Facebook was the clear winner, it’s not really a fair comparison given Facebook’s massive user base—about five times that of Twitter.

Still, the direct challenges issued by Facebook this Super Bowl pose a threat to Twitter. Now a public company, Twitter has faced increasing pressure from investors who are concerned about the social network’s less-than-stellar user engagement and slow user growth. Big television events like the Super Bowl are an opportunity for the network to help this problem, at least in the short term.